Moments of Clarity

Inspiring Quotations

"The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses."
- Utah Philips, folksinger

"I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say."
- W.E.B. DuBois, socialist/protest leader, just before the 1956 election, in a letter to The Nation.

"Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative -- that we're now just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different -- [that] this is human destiny, this is human nature. A poem can add its grain to all the other grains and that is, I think, a rather important thing to do."
- Adrienne Rich, Boston Phoenix, June 1990.

"A perfectly decent person can turn into a monster perfectly easily. And there's no reason why he would feel any different. Because the difference between a perfectly decent person and a monster is just a few thoughts. … If we live from day to day without self-examination, we remain unaware of the dangers we may pose to ourselves and the world. But if we look in the mirror, we just might observe a rapacious face. … Everyone knows that (the) element of goodness exists, that it can grow, or that it can die, and there's something particularly disingenuous and cheap about extricating oneself from the human struggle with the whispered excuse that it's already over."
- Wallace Shawn, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Grove Weidenfeld, 1985.

"If the workers take a notion, they can stop all speeding trains,
every ship upon the ocean, they can tie with mighty chains,
every wheel in the creation, every mine and every mill,
fleets and armies of the nation, will at their command stand still!"
- Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World.

" I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on, I go into another room and read a good book."
- Groucho Marx, actor.

"Here at home and throughout the world people are fighting back against the forces of wealth, privilege, and militarism - some because they have no choice, others because they would choose no other course but the one that leads to peace and justice."
- Michael Parenti, author.

"The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
- from the gravestone of Paul Robeson.

"The way people abroad understood South Africans' ordinary lives came from fiction, and from the theater as well, because our theater did begin to penetrate the rest of the world. So in a modest sense writers were an arm of the liberation struggles, because writers made the world realize what was behind the headlines - how people really lived under apartheid."
- Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize-winning writer, Atlantic Unbound, 2000.

"When the state and big corporations allow and place incinerators in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, when the worst and least nutritious foods are sold in food markets and bodegas; when trees are cut down and schools become mere training grounds for burgeoning rural prisons; when toxic images are pumped into young impressionable minds which glorify gangsterism, pimping and mindlessly shaking boot; when racist twisted cops look at a man standing on a stoop and automatically see a suspect; when the State wages what is in fact an undeclared war on the poor, well, you have some serious sickness that needs to be resisted."
- Mumia Abu-Jamal, journalist/political prisoner on death row, in a statement to the Million Family March, October 2000.

"We are all children of the Earth, help us to defend her."
- Berito Kuwar U'wa, spokesperson for the Traditional U'wa Authority.

"Moral dilemmas are all too easy to analyze in retrospect...Those of us who live affluent lives, well-attended by medical care and treatment, should not ask how Germans [during the Nazi regime] or white South Africans [during Apartheid] could tolerate living in proximity to moral evil. We do so ourselves today, in proximity to the impending illness and death of many millions of people with AIDS."
- Edwin Cameron, South African Justice, XIII International AIDS Conference, July 2000.

"People don't object to paying for defense, but feeding the population is surely more important than the atomic bomb."
- Jose Bove, French sheep farmer/anti-WTO activist, Times of London, 10/25/00.

"A person's dearest possession is life. It is given to him/her but once, and s/he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, s/he might say: All my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world - the fight for Liberation of Humankind. And one must make use of every moment of life, lest some sudden illness or tragic accident cut it short."
- Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel was Tempered, Progress Publishers, 1933 (gender-corrected).

"No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow."
- Alice Walker, writer.


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